[9] M17 uses Frequency-Division Multiple Access (FDMA) technology in which different communication streams are separated by frequency and run concurrently.
With a small hardware modification, TYT MD-380, MD-390 and MD-UV380 handheld transceivers can be flashed with a custom, free, open source firmware[12] to enable M17 support.
In July 2024, a US-based company Connect Systems, Inc. released the CS7000-M17, being the first commercial off-the-shelf handheld transceiver with native M17 support.
Modes bridged include DMR, P25, System Fusion, D-STAR, NXDN, AllStarLink, EchoLink and IRLP.
Kaczmarski, having experimented with TETRA and DMR, decided to create a completely non-proprietary protocol and named it after the club's street address - Mokotowska 17.
As every part of the protocol was intended to be open source, Codec 2, released under the GNU LGPL 2.1 license, was chosen as the speech encoder.